Kirity Roy's Arrest
By Tusha Mittal
19 April, 2010
Tehelka
A marriage hall in Kolkata is packed with 1200 of India’s poorest citizens. They have trekked here from all 
over West Bengal, from remote forests and dingy alleyways, from Howrah, East Midnapore, South 24 Parganas. They have come because there is a story to tell, a brutal story that may otherwise never be told. Finally, there are people willing to hear. These people may never bring justice; may never be able to punish the guilty. Yet, they bring something as potent: the first face of a compassionate democracy.
Now, two years after this public hearing, the man who united 1,200 victims of State atrocities has been arrested, charged with running a “parallel court”. It was a day after the Dantewada massacre led to national outrage — down with the Naxals who don’t believe in the Indian Constitution. Yet, in a quiet corner in West Bengal, a man silently working to strengthen it was led into a police lock up. For decades, civil rights activist Kirity Roy, 57, has trudged the interiors and borders of West Bengal, fact-finding and documenting extra-judicial killings, custodial death, rape, mysterious disappearances, and police torture. 118 cases in 2006, 469 in 2007, 210 the next year. Roy was elected a board member of Amnesty International India in 2003. Last year, more than 300 NGOs elected him as their representative at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. On the morning of April 7, a contingent of 25 policemen arrested this man from his home in Sreerampore, Hooghly.
His crime — holding a public hearing; holding the State accountable; attempting to hold the Constitution to its best face. In the FIR against Roy by the Anti-terrorist cell of Kolkata Police, the above amounts to: criminal conspiracy, impersonating a public servant, impersonation of a jury.
But these ludicrous charges are not the only reason Kirity Roy’s story is significant. His arrest is indicative of a deeper malaise — the attempt to crush democratic dissent, the blindness with which the government brands its most ardent supporters as its adversaries, the movement toward a police State.
Rewind to June 2008. Bustling people’s tribunals were held in nine states across India. It was part of a National Project on Preventing Torture in India, (NPPTI), funded by the European Union. In Kolkata, 82 men and women told their stories, openly, bravely. There was the family of Santosh Mondal, 35, pushed to death by the BSF in East Midnapore as he tried to flee. They chased him for being a smuggler. He dived into a lake. The family says the BSF went after him in a speedboat; the propeller blades killed him. There was Radha Rani Ari — gangraped by CPM goons in Nandigram village in 2007. She wants justice, but no police station will register her complaint.
A symbolic “jury” heard these victims. It is ironic that this jury consisted of several retired government officials, such as a former chairperson of the National Commission for Women, a former senior director of NHRC, and a former District & Sessions Judge. What’s more, a police car escorted many of the officials to what is now being called an illegal tribunal. The organisers also invited the police and BSF to the hearing. “To be fair, we asked the alleged perpetrators to tell us their version,” says Roy, now released on interim bail. One BSF officer, two police inspectors, and the Jailor of Presidency Jail accepted Roy’s invitation to the tribunal. After hearing both sides, the jury recommended steps to prevent such incidents in future.
This is what Javed Shamim, West Bengal’s Joint Commissioner of Police, terms a “kangaroo court”, an attempt to run a parallel judiciary. “The victims are common people who can be easily fooled. They went there expecting justice. Roy sent summons to government officials. Hearings took place in designated court rooms,” Shamim told TEHELKA. If the charges against Roy weren’t as preposterous, the idea that the aam admi can summon a government official might have been somewhat comic. “How can a public body issue summons or a judgement?” says Malay Kumar Sengupta, former chief justice of Sikkim High Court, and currently Chairperson of West Bengal’s OBC Commission. Sengupta was also part of the tribunal’s jury. “What we received was not a summon, but a letter requesting our presence. Hundreds of such tribunals happen across India. Mostly the invited government officials never attend. Roy’s arrest is an attempt to throttle a democratic forum and crush the people’s voice.”ROY GAVE 1,200 VICTIMS OF STATE ATROCITIES A CHANCE TO BE HEARD, BUT THE POLICE ACCUSED HIM OF RUNNING A PARALLEL COURT
One of India’s first people’s tribunals dates back to 1917 when Mahatma Gandhi organised jute-mill workers in Chamaparan, UP, to protest unfair taxes on the Indigo crop levied by the British. Since Independence, human rights groups have used such tribunals as a tool to keep the wheels of democracy greased and turning — against fake encounters in Srinagar and Imphal, against arbitrary hikes in the price of power in Hyderabad, and most recently on Operation Green Hunt in New Delhi. In fact, Kirity Roy had himself organised a similar tribunal in 2005 to assess starvation deaths in West Bengal. No police arrived to arrest him.
The Kolkata Police only initiated an FIR against Roy in June 2008, after a public hearing on police atrocities. They raided the offices of his NGO, the Banglar Manabadhikar Suraksha Mancha (MASUM), seized its letterheads, affidavits, and the stamp seal. MASUM filed a writ petition in the Calcutta High Court against the police action. Astonishingly, a single-judge bench headed by justice Sanjib Banerjee dismissed Roy’s plea in September 2009, stating that the police was within its rights to investigate whether Roy had indeed impersonated the judiciary. That the court did not immediately dismiss the case against Roy points to a deeper systemic decay. Roy challenged this high court order and appealed to the Division Bench of Chief Justice Mohit Ranjan Shah. On March 10 this year, the bench stayed the previous High Court order, asking the police to file a chargesheet by April 8. Roy was arrested the day before. Kolkata’s Chief Metropolitan Magistrate granted him bail the same day on technical grounds. The police had added new sections of forgery and cheating in the FIR without the court’s permission. The next hearing is on April 27.
As a student in Kolkata, Roy had actively participated in West Bengal’s political churnings in the 1960s and 70s. Disillusioned with politics, he resigned as secretary of a local CPM committee in 1984 to begin working with people’s rights forums. In 1993, when he deposed as the only witness against the police in the famous Bikari Paswan case — a jute mill worker picked up by the police, never to surface again — Roy saw the underbelly of the State. His wife, a local school teacher, received threats. Explosives were hurled into his balcony. In December the same year, he was arrested for partaking in a Human Rights Day event in Assam. The latest arrest is only another milestone in his fight against State atrocities. “We just want the victims to be heard,” says Roy. “We don’t have the right to hold a people’s tribunal, but the police have the right to kill.”
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